Women-majority parl eludes Iceland after vote recount
REYKJAVIK: Iceland’s claim of electing Europe’s first femalemajority legislature was retracted due to a miscalculation after the centrist ruling coalition added to its majority.
While initial data showed that some 33 of 63 seats in Iceland’s parliament, the Althing, were won by women in Saturday’s ballot, it later emerged that a handful of votes had been miscounted, affecting the distribution of so-called “compensatory” seats, according to public broadcaster RUV, which communicates election results. This means there will be 33 men and 30 women in parliament.
The change doesn’t affect the overall distribution of seats showing Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir’s bloc, which unites three parties from left to right, boosted its representation by two to a combined 37.
Predictions failed to pan out that Jakobsdottir’s coalition would struggle in the face of calls from the left for higher healthcare spending and worries over climate change in the North Atlantic island nation.
Instead, the grouping won a fresh endorsement from voters after getting the Iceland’s tourism-dependent economy through a pandemic-induced slump. Turnout was 80.1%, according to RUV, compared with 81.2% in the 2017 election.
The ruling parties signalled the current set-up is likely to continue, even as they stopped short of clear commitments in their first post-election comments.
“We all said before the elections that if the government holds its majority it’ll be normal to have talks,” Jakobsdottir said on Sunday in RUV broadcast. “Nothing has changed there.”
Finance minister and former premier Bjarni Benediktsson, who leads the conservative Independence Party, said he won’t be seeking the premiership even as his party maintained the biggest presence in parliament.
The land of fire and ice, which provided many of the stunning backdrops to Game of Thrones, has sought to diversify its economy to avoid the repeat of recent boom-bust cycles.
Tourism soared in the past decade to become Iceland’s growth engine after the 2008 financial crisis triggered a collapse of the country’s outsized banking sector. But tourists were kept out of the country for months by the pandemic. Iceland is the only Nordic country that hasn’t bounced back to pre-crisis levels of activity after its economy plunged 6.6% in
2020.